The invention is directed to card feeding system used in connection with a food product conveyor and handling system, and more specifically to a system for placing product carrying cards under a product or group of products being transported by the food product conveyor. Specifically, the card feeding system is for feeding a retail bacon card under a shingled group of bacon slices.
Many types of food products require a substrate in the form of a stiff card placed under the product. For example, retail bacon packages require a card placed under a shingled group of bacon slices. Such systems are also used in connection with food or lunchmeat setups being carried on a food product conveyor. Some of the prior known systems insert flexible sheets of paper utilizing feed rollers that insert the paper through a space between a product feed conveyor and a discharge conveyor as the product passes over the space. However, the known systems are not suitable for inserting cards or rigid substrates. In the known systems, a card is taken from a card stack and then fed by a card conveyor into a gap between the food product feed conveyor and a downstream conveyor. However, these systems are not developed specifically for use in a wash down and high sanitation environment and do not perform well when moist or wet. Further, such systems which feed cards from the bottom of a card stack to the card conveyor typically rely on the weight of the card stack to create an appropriate friction required to feed the cards. This often results in double feeds or missed cards as well as jams when a card only partially feeds due to insufficient loading against the rollers which pull the card from the bottom of the stack and onto the card feed conveyor which then delivers the card beneath the product as it is transported from the product feed conveyor onto a product discharge conveyor through the gap between these conveyors. For systems which utilize suction cups to lift a card from the top of a stack of cards, the suction often results in multiple cards being lifted together, resulting in the same issues with double feeds and jams. These existing systems do not utilize a final staging process ensuring precision substrate to product placement requiring manual rework.
It would be desirable to provide a card feeding system which precisely positions a card beneath a food product, such as a shingled group of bacon slices, at high speed and with high reliability in avoiding double feeds, missed feeds or jams.